Tag Archives: Poetry

The house was abandoned now. She recalled
her childhood, the memories dancing, empty,
through the hallways, caught up in the breathing
spiderwebs that draped the corners, the horizon
of the tiled bathroom floor was shrinking, fallen
through the trailer’s asbestos, a small void

where the animals buried themselves. A voided
utility bill with a bounced check, a stack of late fees fallen
on the bottom line, her lanterns were recalled
for trying to burn down a thrust of houses on the horizon.
Luckily they were never found again, empty.
The fires she left behind were still barely breathing

on the rooftops. Her ex-husband on the couch breathing
his favorite smoke, some brand of nihilism and a void
in his hands where he lost his zippo, an empty
gesture when she held her children, where her face had fallen.
She had to steal her own car while he slept, drove for the horizon
until she ran into her parent’s old house, if she recalled

correctly. She stood in the new dark, her past recalled
across the screen door of her eyelids. Her mother’s breathing
room–she needed to be left alone after a big fight–its horizon
lines pointed toward the red barn, the northern void
of her father’s face. She told her friends she had fallen
down a staircase, the bruises were blue and empty

enough to heal, but she wasn’t. Her mother was an empty
can of gas, a cut break line, a quivering voice that recalled
911 until they called her back, a telephone pole fallen
with a busted transformer. In that same house, breathing
the same blue-white electrical air, her own daughter’s void
clinging to her leg as she checked the broken window, the horizon

so far away she could run to it, her husband’s horizon
sent over the razor’s edge of the flat earth in her mirror’s empty
rear-view. She would not raise her children in a void.
It had been 30 years since she had been here, she recalled,
standing in the same living room, the wallpaper peeling with breath,
alive, molting the old skin of the past, the screaming fallen

with the old walls. Her daughter recalled a stark emptiness
from the corner, from before she was born, breathing on the horizon
of her memory, where the hand had fallen like a struck match through the void.

It was the way she preferred to appear,
a streak through a magnetic photograph,
here and gone before you knew what had really happened.
She vibrated in that flash, before you could say hello,
between two thoughts, her mouth, if you were lucky,
a buzzing mist of kisses. She was in so many places at once,
you keep meeting her, traveling with time
like her favorite book in her pocket, going back into it.

She leaves you notes in side dimensions
just in case you forgot your keys one more time,
forgot why you entered the room, what you were looking for,
open the refrigerator with the opposite hand
and it is hanging there, a shopping list for gravity.

As if the sun was too slow to warm you,
as if there were too much time between now and now,
she was there so suddenly moments didn’t even have a chance,
before you could remember the world without her, sooner than light.

Before they knew he was dead–
his face in rags, perhaps a leper
mummified with plague–he stumbled
through the city, the artificial sky
burning in the air, acrid, pumped
by concrete antennas
glittering with business,
the greasy fog lying on the street,
crawling from the sewers.
They never looked twice,

thought, perhaps, his ancient stench
was from drinking too much water,
was, as the holomyths foretold
(they used to call them books?)
a beast soaking with wisdom, freewill.
You don’t talk to those, make eye contact,
share a GUI terminal, or (market forbid!)
an oxymask. When you breathe good painkillers,
everybody knows, especially Hive,
you wouldn’t want his stench of creativity
eating at your lungs. He stumbled with an air

of antiquity, a zombie in a swarm of drones,
losing all efficiency, staring up into the future
around him, knowing it would never really come–
the anachronism of the present constantly outdated
from overbearing upgrades. His own natural skin,
a sarcophagus. They hovered past in exoskeletons,
maglifted into the void of office sectors.

In a world of immortals, DNA-mapped,
nano-gridded blood, he moaned through alleys,
laughed at like a ghost, a fairy tale.
He refused to modify his body. They smirked
every time his heart beat. They chided him,
the children unplugged long enough to point,
for having a stomach, liver, they poked
at his disconnected spleen. A man, in this world,

is a waste of time, can’t get to work fast enough,
must eat and walk covered in rags
like a mock-up, vintage cartoon ape
smoking cigarettes and slapping his own head.

When he could see the sun, through the Lucid-glass
shelling the Company in campaign ads,
(he saw it once, in the future, but it was blurry,
burning his eyes) he promised himself,
the world, as he dragged his cracked-off arm
behind him like a fermented club,
he promised no more talk of ideas
or progress, vision, happiness, fulfillment,
philosophy. He would crawl back into the shadow
like a puppet. He would strip the gauze
from his scabbed eyes, and end the curse
of overlapping past/present time, and die.

For fuck’s sake, fold his plastic halo up
between his legs, he could finally die.

You can’t step your toes into the rabbit hole. The wormhole chooses you, all or nothing. Enter the void and cross the veil, dive into it. It swallows you voraciously, you have no will, ego, consciousness left. The path of patterns break apart and you are left stranded. You must fall into it, merging into the mirror. All glimpses are illusion of material consciousness (shells breaking apart into linear time). Give it up (letgoletgo), surrender into the void. You will not recognize death until it swallows you. Mortality is your only gift, give it up. You need nothing. Living is bigger than you, space spirals into organic growth with root systems stretching their mathematical patterns beyond your realization. The master tunes into his will by bending reality into himself (bends himself to occupy being).

Glass trees, prismatic, nymphs dancing through shifting fractals, a network of coincidences collapsing into itself, in the grass blades, naked bodies moaning, convulsing, silent to the holographic worlds of the hermit stumbling drunkenly into the fool dancing to his hypnotic wisdom,the ignorance of innocence corrupted with discipline sinking into the cortex of my limbic system,channeling existence through the will of persistent imagination,cracking open patterns of automatic behavior and telepathic communication.

Another lazy day in the sun formulating the rotation of celestial bodies travelling through incessant determination. We are beautiful beings linked as the ego becomes aware of the preliminal systems, sharing an altered mindspace, intertwining ribcages of distorted, heart-racing empathy.

Can you see me with a broken antenna, spines bent in the storm, twist me until you receive the snowy signal? The feed is dim against the moonlight, your small chance to stare at the stars. The body warps until it feels itself floating in the transmission, can we find our way home on it, out of body and sinking into our own ways back. Your face shimmers into every person you’ve ever shown me. The storm bolts uprightin my bed, still trying to breathe underwater. What an insane fool I’ve been to believe myself for this long. I would apologize if it meant something. Sing to me and I’ll fall asleep, even if it means I’ll never see you again.

Travel through me like time,a desert landscape of moons rising over midnight wastelands,full of signs, correspondences, and hallucinations, coincidences and liquid interactions (alchemy, breathing the cancerous fumes of quicksilver and physics),

Out of gas and stranded, we still stumble into miracles in the kindness of strange people,head full of empty pockets of stories and a long road twisted into the future.

The siren song is finally deadly enough to listen to, lost on a ship, sailing into the fractured future. It unwinds time’s selfish clock. Waves of space wash into my face as we dance and we become an image of panoramic sunrise, virtually projecting itself onto the backs of our eyes like a hologram.

The green field tempts me, the light glimmering through the leaves onto supple, nubile bodies like an endless delusion, a prismatic charm of delight, hedonism, machinery. Enchanting lover, mesmerizing muse, serendipitous succubus, turn your whole inside out until i can sense you breaking free from the cage of your skin.

Your tongue burned a hole in my ribs the size of a key, your nimble fingers tumbling my chamber. Your mouth fills me with the sound of unlocking, bolt by bolt by bone I am opening. I am opening.

A drink in a sideshow carnival, a sex death wish, a list of inconsequential disasters. Fate emanates into kismet serendipity. Chaos answers to nothingness and order cracks open the flower of self to sink into nonsense. The pain is numbness and you can share with me, sedative, unconscious inconsistency, playing in the mirror against itself. The egg is a tomb of self-creation. We were born in death to live matter from the origin of motion.

I can feel my body casting shadows, the sun vibrating into my chest, shifting my heart into a cloudy web of laser beams. I am melting into the earth, curling up in her endless chambers, the cave of my mouth yawning into the sky, crumbling with dirt. My head is overflowing with birds diving into the blue green water of my hands, swimming into the waves. Space is expanding through me, stretching me, filling me with emptiness. Pour your kisses into me, tongue of light. Throw my shadows onto the ground, carry them into your bed until they sleep, burn them into gold, these elemental dreams.

If you need a crowbar to open your skull,
you probably weren’t yourself in the first place.
Sometimes it’s right to let a little light in. Your face
is a garden seeded with nail-flowers
and rosebush railroad spikes. The train
is pounding like a hammer with a mad god
dancing in the engine. There are roots in your palm
and an animal with a thousand changing faces
is eating from it slowly and staring up
at your new eye–its blasted visions
of dynamite–a metal taste in your mouth,
seafoam lips smooth as doll plastic,
the song of a revolver
screeching with needled records
grooved through your jaw, a purple smell
as you bend down to your knee, growing in place,
your head steeled with the blossom
of a blown-out dandelion, a new man.

How do you hold on to so much December?
The crystal clarity of your hands drip like ice
from the ghostly rooftop of your chest,
your face tilted to the globed flurry of street lights.
The frost is gathering in your tangled hair,
the crunch of time in your jaw
like boots on the virgin snow, our tracks
from house to car to mailbox, crisscrossing through
each other, the impression of teeth
left through the ground as the ice bites
on our sweet red lips, the still, calm dark
of the night lit with the saturated glow of cold and moon.

How do you let go when your fingers turn black
and numb, clutching at every memory
as the snow drifts into your eyes
like the stark white of a sterile hospital room?

Your arms wrap around me like the smooth glass
of a frozen lake. The sled of your smile
speeds across the corners of your mouth
like wild children, reckless with laughter.

The birds stand in the skeleton of trees,
take the circular flight of ribcages, refusing to migrate.
Like them, I am late for work, trying to carve
out the driveway, dig up the history
of a red 4 door sedan like an archeologist
with the delicate precision of a shovel,
etch out my survival, the proof of it
like a temple ruin in the Himalayan mountainside
waiting to melt.

Sometimes my memories feel like a recording
played in reverse, the guttural tongue of an unknown ritual,
a tone at the base of a spine like a skyscraper
anticipating a hurricane, groaning with sine waves.

But you’ve shown me how to wait for the warmth,
Every new day longer, spilling into spring,
But I need more. I’ve spent so many hours
piecing together layers of clockwork in my chest,
if only I could pile enough seconds in my hands
to lose one more night with you.

Even if death does not disappear,
we know that being reborn is only a matter of time.
Tomorrow is not just a new beginning
but another cycle in our life of chances
that our experiences together
has offered us the opportunity to take
until we are here, found in the endless now,
barebones, present, and being,
our voices rising through the television static
of the sky until our throats are, once again, full of spring.

So no, this is not the end of anything
or the beginning of another, but just the continuation
of us. The world is sleeping, but we are waking up,
the stove sparking with yellow flame,
hovering with breakfast.

You stumble from our bed, a clump of dirt
in your hands like a cup of coffee.
Your bare feet prickle as the heat
is sucked into the hardwood floor.
The earth is filled with seeds, new beginnings,
second chances, as you gaze past
the gray window, out into the morning,
your skin silky as hot marshmallows.

You bite into the dirt like a new apple,
and the sun’s magnetic poles flip upside down,
I can see stars unfold from within themselves
in front of your face, your stomach mapped
with the celestial patterns of heaven
like growing trees, an iris opened to the dawn,
like you have swallowed god,
strings of fire blowing back over your body
like a sunspot twisting itself into into flares, blue and gold.

the sun is here to watch, and to burn,
and eventually die, but before all that goes down,
I’m calling in to work drunk tomorrow,
and tonight, I’m holding you
even if you cough, the space between us
just a thin layer of twilight,
a knowing brush of eye contact and a smile,
the hour before anything could happen.